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Nerval's Lobster writes "One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden's east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea's tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn't stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook's datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area's proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it."

When you're developing a system on the scale of FaceBook and running on a language like PHP and the article is about building yet another data center with a 120 megawatt draw, maybe the comment you're responding to could have some value.

Let's imagine for a moment that having two departments of developers, one who designs and builds a PHP version of the site and a second who reimplements the functionality using more optimal languages... we can see these people as being human compilers. When you're running a system on this scale, if you can improve performance of your code by 10% by using a more optimal language, you could effectively reduce your need for power by 10%. When you're measuring your power consumption in hundreds of megawatts, somehow, I figure that might be attractive.

So, let's suggest for a moment that UI designers and database developers aren't always the most optimal coders. I know, who'd have though? Now let's imagine that there's programmers who adore sitting around cutting a few clock cycles off here and there (there are). While PHP may give you a huge amount of flexibility, it comes at a huge cost. It requires developers to use a huge amount of string processing to accomplish relatively trivial tasks. PHP makes it look like a single line of code, but in reality, that single line, if substituted with a few lines of hand optimized code could use less than a hundredth of the CPU power. Now consider that even with projects like HipHop, the code given to the system is heavily burdened with table lookups which can't be replaced programatically by an optimal compiler.

So, I'm going to give both of your statements merit. First because you're defending the technology as an enabler. He's bashing the technology because of lack of efficiency. I agree with you that PHP scales fantastically in this case, that however does not mean it does it in an optimal fashion which I think should be seen as the spirit of his posting.

Probably a lot more than the 10% mark from hitting the CPU 10% less since even a datacentre in a cold climate. You pay for every watt used in datacentre servers twice - once to do the job and some non zero cost to get rid of the heat.In just about every way PHP makes even perl code written by a newbie look fast and secure, let alone comparing it to compiled code.

Kansas would be a great place for wind farms. I have found that I can't open the umbrella on my lawn furniture for fear it may blow away. Unfortunately the city ordinance will not allow me to have a wind turbine. I think they are afraid I'll not have to pay an electric bill.

if they just plonked their datacenter on antarctic ice it would eventually melt into the ice and would create its own ice chest when the water above it refreezed... it would be even cooler if they made the datacenter as a huge pyramid that reconfigured itself every 10 minutes

If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment in some sort of reasonably efficient fashion we could build these datacenters in warmer areas, deserts even. All that 120-degree desert in africa would suddenly become valuable real-estate.

Heat needs somewhere to flow to, in order to make it valuable as a power source. Simply being very hot isn't sufficient. That said, the amount of light falling on the region IS directly usable as a power source, and with very little population or wildlife to disturb, this may prove quite an attractive place to gather solar power. Since transmission of power is one of its major cost factors, the data centers may well follow.

The positive side is you can just hang those solar panels vertically pointed south and get good output:)That's how they use solar power is used at Dome A deep in Antarctica, but with the panels pointed north of course.

If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment

There isn't. You can extract energy only by dumping the energy/heat of the ambient environment to a lower temperature or lower potential environment.

Having said that, most weather is due to a transfer of heat from the ambient environment (which in turn has been heated by considerable solar radiation) to space. And we can in turn harvest some of that energy transfer via wind or hydroelectric power.

A planet wide system of tubes and turbines can be used to extract energy of expanding gas... However, you'll be harvesting your planet's angular momentum. I don't recommend it, especially not while your crust and mantle are full of radioactive elements still.

I know a lot of./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.

What about the heat transfer from the servers to the atmosphere? I'm no environmental physics expert, but with the ground so cold wouldn't that cause a sharp increase in the temperature at higher altitudes and upset the airflow with hotter air moving rapidly towards the equator? Wouldn't this create disruptive weather patterns.. ie. low pressure hitting high pressure causing violent storms?

Perhaps it's not enough impact, but the question remains.. "How many servers does it take to change a weather patt

The above poster made that assumption because you've made a surprisingly common but someone huge scaling mistake. A simple way to compare it is the phrase "a fart in a hurricane". A few kW, or even a few MW if they put all of their servers on the planet there, is not going to do much to the air temperature there since there is plenty of cold air to move in before much heating has happened and that part of the world is notoriously windy. It's not convective heating in a closed room.

Screw the CO2.... Norway really needs to jack up power costs since it's a bitch that Sweden who barely counts as a power producer pays less for electricity than we do. Somehow, Norway has obscene power costs and we produce insane amounts of it.

Very well, but at least dedicate the effort to a worthy cause like Protein Folding, SETI processing or even a Library-of-Congress sized recipe book - the idiocracy present on facebook can fuck off and die for all I care.

What they are doing is using the free cold to cut their costs. But of course that heating will effect the weather in that area, which will affect the ecosystem which will start to spread its effect. There may be widespread and deeply felt consequences down the road, but not for Facebook. Dumping heat is the same sort of externalized cost as say dumping waste chemicals in a stream. The company does not pay, it lets those downstream pay. You could argue that the effect is small but as we know the butterfly e

Thanks to wind and ocean currents all of Europe is warmer than many places in North America at the same latitude. Wisconsin gets colder than this place. I think it has more to do with abundant water and better year round temperature consistency.

The NSA will gets $4 billion budget for cyber operations. Say 10% is spent on data storage, and they pay way over the odds at $100/TB.$400,000,000 / 100 = 4,000,000 Terabytes = 4 Billion Gigabytes2 billion people online = 2 GB per person per year

And that's why they have huge data centers and projects to build two more stretching into 2016.

Or alternatively, since it's mostly Americans getting spied on, more like 13GB per US citizen per year, from just 10% of their budget.

Lulea is a major center of the iron mining industry of northern Sweden, which produces massive amounts of waste heat. This is used to great advantage by the town already, and when Facebook asked the town if they should just went into the atmosphere or if they wanted to use the waste heat, the town said "no, thank you." Source: I'm a native of Lulea.

"A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data."

Been there. Close to the central square, there is a street that is quite steep. To prevent the unavoidable car crashes in winter, they simply heat the asphalt. I guess they could use datacenter heat right there.. Once you get out of the city center, it has beautiful nature..

Another good place to host the datacenter would have been iceland. Its winters are not as cold, but the summers are significantly colder. The average high in July is 14 C, compared with 20 in Lulea). It also has abundant, cheap geothermal energy, which makes it popular for aluminium production. To service one of the aluminium plants there, a 630 MW power station was built. Until then, the total power consumption of Iceland had been about 300 MW! According to this table [wikipedia.org], the price of electricity in Iceland i

i would love to see a US government reaction to a proposal by Facebook to build a datacenter in Siberia... of course it wouldn't happen... maybe it would start another cold war, which would also be good for datacenters:)